


Malicious & Benign

by lilykotsu (lilycobra)



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ghost Hunters, Broganes - Cousins Edition, Demons, Female Pronouns for Pidge | Katie Holt, Hunk/not making stupid supernatural horror movie decisions, M/M, More tags later, Other, Psychic Abilities, Urban Fantasy, Witchcraft, lance has a terrible auntie, mild familial abuse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-06
Updated: 2017-11-06
Packaged: 2019-01-30 05:08:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,922
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12646731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilycobra/pseuds/lilykotsu
Summary: When paranormal investigators Keith, Hunk, and Pidge get called to a remote property by an heiress they’re excited to get their most heavily-documented case of supernatural activity yet... But when the activity turns out to be the stalking haunt of a powerful demonic entity known as The Shadow Man, they must team up with a reluctant psychic named Lance to figure out how to banish it once and for all.





	Malicious & Benign

**Author's Note:**

> Okay so, please bear with me while I get my bearings with this fic, but also:
> 
> 1\. There's not going to be any smut, but there will be a few descriptions of awkward boners, nice butts, morning afters, etc.  
> 2\. Swear words  
> 3\. Everyone is 19/20-21/aka adults, except Shiro (because he and I are both Old and Tired) and Pidge who is 17

It was a dark and stormy night. The kind of night where the winds howled and the sky opened up to pour buckets down on the unsuspecting people below. Trees violently danced and the ground shook with every roll of thunder that echoed prior streaks of lightning.  
  
And the PKE meters would be going off the charts, an apparition forming just outside of the doorway to the parlor… maybe the _Ghostbusters_ theme would start playing or something.  
  
TV always portrayed “ghost hunting” as some dramatic affair, where results were guaranteed and the few spectres that communicated with the bumbling hosts were troublemakers or small children calling out for help.  
  
Keith Kogane knew that the only thing TV got right was that paranormal investigations happened at night and technology was involved.  
  
It was usually during the summer. On unbearably hot, sticky nights where they couldn't risk turning on the AC or leaving the cars running for risk of damaging any EVP recordings they may have gotten. Results were not always concrete - when Keith had started his paranormal hobby, kids from his middle school had stood outside of a foreclosed house he was camped out in with a camera; shouting and lighting off firecrackers. Results might not have been guaranteed, but idiot rednecks not minding their own fucking business was.  
  
“We're going to need you to test out those stairs, Keith,” Hunk's voice came over the walkie-talkie. “That's where the homeowners say most of the alleged activity is concentrated.”  
  
Keith reached an arm back to press the TALK button of the talkie hooked to the back of his gear belt. “Roger that.”  
  
“Dude, c'mon, we've been over this,” Hunk sighed over the radio. “You gotta take the talkie off your butt when you press the button to respond. We can't hear you well like that.”  
  
“You heard him,” Pidge lightly scolded over the same channel, clearly amused. “Stop talking out of your butt and get to those stairs.”  
  
Keith rolled his eyes. What else could he do while creeping around an old farmhouse in the middle of rural North Dumbfucksville? The owners were looking to set up a haunted B &B in a colonial-era farmhouse and wanted “actual proof” that their property was haunted. (Keith had no idea why people would pay to spend a night in a frilly floral-printed, haunted nightmare land, but then again Keith also wasn't the kind of person to regularly shit where he ate.) So far, outside of the alarming amount of musty smells and what Pidge referred to as “coked-out-grandma” decor, they'd found nothing.

He finally reached the base of the stairs with no signs of haunted breakfast toast yet. Just as he was trying to unhook the talkie from his belt, a hand grasped his wrist, a breathy sigh whispered in his left ear, and chills ran up his spine.  
  
He was alone in the house.  
  
He always was.  
  
Hunk much preferred to be the tech guy who sat outside. Pidge was the data analyst. Keith... well, he was the guy who went in to try to come face to face with ghosts. Back in high school they’d had a fourth member of their team, but that was going on almost four years back; and the less Keith had to think of high school, the better he’d be.  
  
Adrenaline shot through his body and he whirled around, shining his flashlight on the wall behind him and seeing nothing. But that grasp on his wrist had been good. An audible noise, physical touch, meant that the microphones and cameras would have picked it up.  
  
Keith unclipped a digital voice recorder from his hip, turned it on, and placed it gently at the base of the staircase. He then took a few steps away from it and settled his back against the wall... ignoring the way his black tee clung to the small of his back.

“Uh,” Keith started to address the seemingly empty room. “Hello. My name's Keith…”

* * *

  
Their workroom was in the basement of Hunk's house. It was furnished into a playroom sometime after he had turned eight, which explained the bright hues of color painted on the walls, but now was filled with various computers, screens, and a TV in front of the world's cushiest futon - which was where Keith was parked, in front of the fans and a safe distance from Pidge's working space.  
  
From where he was, Keith could see a flurry of lines danced across the screen; the spirit that had wanted Keith's attention yesterday night. It disappeared from the sensors when he had turned around. But there was a faint half-lined form floating in the middle of the staircase after he had started the EVP session.

Heavy breathing, as if the person had been terribly ill - it sounded lighter in pitch, like a young woman. And the breathing kept getting closer and closer to where Keith had been sitting, but the outline sensors had lost track of the form on the stairs.  
  
_“Can you tell me who you are?”_ Keith could be heard on the recording. “ _Can you tell me how you got here?”_  
  
_“He watches.”_ The words were breathy yet clear. “ _The Shadow.”_  
  
And like the breathing had gotten louder, it faded away the same way. Keith hadn't heard anything, and had stayed twenty minutes outside of that to ask more questions but there were no more signs of anything other.|  
  
“Ohhh man,” Hunk bit at his fingernails.  
  
The Shadow Man was a legend in those parts. He appeared as an inhumanly tall, “buzzing” shadow that on occasion terrified anyone out at night out in the hilltowns. He had been spotted on remote dirt roads, on parts of the Appalachian Trail, even inside the bedrooms of older homes.  
  
But that was all he was - a legend. No one had ever gotten proof. No one talked about him outside of scared, quiet whispers - and even then it was only the tourists or the children who spoke of him, the locals kept their mouths shut.  
  
Best theory Keith had on the cryptid spectre? It was some kind of roaming entity that fed off of fear; it appeared in bedrooms to frighten and feed off people in their beds, and its presence alone could make someone weep for their life. There were only three rumored attempts of it trying to possess someone...  
  
“Like were we _close_ to him last night? Oh man, I hope we weren't-”  
  
“Hunk, proving the Shadow Man's existence could make our careers as paranormal investigators,” Keith frowned. “We don’t even know if this is the same one.”

“Yeah, but he's supposed to be super scary!” Hunk shook his head, charcoal locks flying. “Ten feet tall and looking directly at him makes you cry and your bones vibrate? Uh, no thank you, count me out of that one, I don’t need any help with crying and I like my bones just the way they are!”

“Regardless,” Pidge interrupted, tucking a stubborn hazel bang behind an ear. “Even if we were close to him, we have no way to track him. We can’t even get a decent scatter plot map to find a location he prefers since no one will talk about him. He could pop up two towns over tomorrow night, or next week; we have no way to know where and when the Shadow Man shows up.”

“Can we just, like, stop mentioning the You-know-who Man?” Hunk anxiously whined. His square hands wrung the hem of his cotton t-shirt. “If you talk about monsters, they show up at your door.”

Keith tried not to snap at those words. “Hunk, we’re talking about the Shadow Man, not Voldemort.” He was terrible at not-snapping. So he tried his best to slightly alter the discussion: “And that’s just-” he let out an angry, but calming breath  “-superstition. Right now we work with the assumption it’s not the same entity, and we need to figure out if that recording is a statement or a warning.”

“Right,” Pidge agreed. “I’m leaning towards a statement. ‘I’m not talking because this other entity is around.’ It’s classic.”

“I’m going with warning,” Hunk said. “‘Get out of town. He’s _watching_ you.’”

“Well, Keith, looks like you’re the tie-breaker.”

“Statement. We’ve seen it before, maybe not with this sort of thing attached to it, but it’s not unheard of.” He frowned and leaned back against the futon.

“I can clean up the thermal images. If Hunk can get the few historical documents we found on the place in order, we can deliver the good news in the morning,” Pidge concluded. “I guess we can tell them they can open their haunted bed-and-breakfast, but they’ve only got one and a half ghosts. Not sure who’s going to pay for one-point-five ghosts.”

“Not me,” Hunk proudly declared, rolling his chair to one of the desks with three monitors and only on keyboard.

* * *

 

Ever since he was ten, Keith Kogane lived in old A-frame house he shared with his cousin, Takashi Shirogane. Takashi, who almost stubbornly preferred to be called Shiro, was also the group’s manager - which mostly entailed being the Responsible Adult who would get the team permission to go ghost hunting on someone’s property, occasionally he fielded actual requests from clients.

Most recently, Shiro had been working on a “big surprise” and spent a lot of time in his office - which was really just the corner of the laundry room he had stuck a tiny desk in. It offered a small amount of privacy with a folding door and not much else.

When Keith stuck the key in the front door half-past midnight, Shiro was still up. His form was outlined against the closed door by the overhead light, and the vibe Keith got was that he had been on the phone for a while. Keith skulked by, folders with what he had for the current clients in hand as he swiped a piece of cold pizza from a box left on the counter. It was rare for Shiro to order pizza, which confirmed Keith’s theory that he must have been on the phone all day and had gotten pizza in place of cooking. Shiro was most likely on the phone with the studio.

Keith wandered upstairs to his bedroom and tossed his phone and the folders onto his bed while he balanced eating cold pizza, kicking off his boots, and finding the chain for the ceiling light in the dark. He finally found the light chain when his phone’s screen lit up with a text from Pidge.

He had been touch-and-go with a couple of people back in high school, the two members of the ghost-hunting group included, before he had dropped out at the age of sixteen. (Shiro had said that he would only sign off on Keith’s decision if Keith got his GED. One GED later, Keith could literally tell people that he dropped out of high school to chase ghosts.) It wasn't until a little after his eighteenth birthday and some mostly inconclusive investigations of his own that he got that message on Facebook from Hunk. It was months old and Keith still didn't know what made him check that hellsite that day, but he was honestly glad he did.

That was over two years ago now, and now Keith was almost twenty-one and had ended up being part of a semi-respectable team of paranormal investigators.  
  
Semi-respectable might have been pushing it. A lot of people still laughed. A lot. But their team had been featured in several newspapers, and in the last year had a small paragraph mentioning them several pages into the Boston Globe.  
  
Now they were semi-respected enough to be in the running for their own TV show; the offer was the main project that Shiro had been busy helping them sort out the legal mumbo of.  
  
On one hand, paranormal TV shows were a mockery of their already heavily-mocked profession. On the other, being on TV would be nice to rub in the faces of several assholes and Keith’s dipshit of a dad. He had to admit to himself that a big “fuck you, I’m on TV” was very, very tempting. 

Keith ultimately had no idea how to feel about it. Especially since they still didn’t have an official name for their team, which was one of the requirements for getting the show - name themselves, or the network would stick them with some stupid name.

Which was where they all got stuck. Originally, back in high school, back when there were four instead of three, they had called themselves VOLT - the Voluntary Occult Liaison Team. They had been more focused on communication with spirits, rather than just proving they existed. But ghost stories with no proof wasn’t getting them a TV show, it was about the hunt and the proof and nothing else. Least to mention the only one that had any idea what ghosts wanted was no longer in his "ghost phase" and hadn't spoken to Keith since he'd dropped out; Keith was "not a good influence", and it wasn't like Keith could argue.

Keith stuck his pizza in his mouth and snatched his phone from his bed, glancing over the succession of texts Pidge had just sent: _[just left Hunk’s | he's still anxious about shadow man | keeps ranting about how mentioning demons makes them show up | wants to know if he can skip the meeting with the clients tomorrow | since you’re our poster boy text him ASAP or he’ll be up all night again]_

Keith’s jaw tightened as his eyes looked over the superstitious crap again.

 _You don’t talk about the devil or he’ll show up at your door._ A strained voice echoed those words in Keith’s mind for a moment - Keith could still remember the tears in those eyes when those words were spoken - before he did his best to shove it away from the forefront of his attention.

He tried to swallow a tacky lump in his throat. It was probably the pizza he was trying to gulp down dry.

 _[Will do]_ he texted Pidge. _[And if im ever the poster boy im quitting]_

 _[Go to sleep Hunk | Shiro will come with me to the meeting]_ Keith scratched at his chin, briefly wondering if that sounded too blunt. He reluctantly added: _[Feel better]_

A light rapping caught his attention, and Keith snapped his attention to Shiro standing in his doorway. His hair was only slightly a mess, and he had the sleeves of his button-down shirt rolled up. He had knocked with his prosthetic arm, which created a sharper sound then just flesh knuckles on wood, which he _knew_ would get Keith’s attention more. (For a man who’d only had a fake arm for a year and a half he sure figured out how to lovingly bug his younger cousin with it with incredible efficiency.)

“I see you found the pizza,” Shiro said, pointing to his own mouth as Keith realized he was standing in the middle of his bedroom staring intently at his phone, with one boot on, and pizza hanging out of his mouth.

Keith removed the pizza so he could speak. “Long day?”

“Yes and no.” Shiro was smiling - no, _Shiro was smirking_. “I could ask you the same. It’s almost one in the morning.”

Keith let out a frustrated breath and threw himself onto his bed, metal springs squeaking as he worked his other boot off. “We had a productive, ghost-positive day,” he said, stressing the words with a form of fake cheerfulness. Another point for their TV show terms was the fact that they could only show so many negative-concluded hunts, they needed plenty of positives to supposedly make a watchable show. “You look happy about something.”

“You know how the Altea family is putting in that new ski resort on the North-side of the valley?”

The Altea family was one of the older families in the state. Old families had old money, old money bought a lot of things - deeds, towns, mansions, and a swath of land where rugged forest was being carved away to make way for pleasure skiing.

That much land changing that quickly could certainly stir things up economically, ecologically, and _ectologically_.

Was “ectological” even a word? Keith would have to double-check with Hunk, because the more he thought about it he vaguely suspected Pidge had been lying when she said it was.

Shiro’s words and smirking seemed to make more sense, but there was _no way_ …

“Are you saying… they’ve got a _ghost problem?_ ” Keith asked, his head tilting to the side quizzically.

“I’m saying there may or may not be an issue with some of the workers building the place, and the problem may or may not be ghosts.” Shiro folded his arms across his chest. “They may be looking for some proof of what trails have the most alleged activity.”

“Why,” Keith snorted, wrinkling his nose. When Shiro motioned the folders from the team’s more recent hunt, Keith could not have frowned any deeper. “ _Really?_ I’ve heard of haunted hotels but _haunted skiing?_ ”

“They’re paying,” Shiro went on. “And with an opportunity carrying this kind of name, it could really help solidify the TV show deal. Maybe give us a bit more pull with the contract.”

Keith sighed, defeated.

“It’s a big property, so they’re giving you a week in the field and will let you guys stay in one in one of the trailers they have on-site.”

“Generous. When do they expect us?”

“Next Sunday.”


End file.
